With the development of the Internet, increasing applications are targeting generating, propagating, and sharing a variety of information. Therefore, a fully new information/content-centric network application mode emerges. A network in this mode are referred to as an information centric network (Information Centric Network, ICN for short). In the ICN, a named data network (Named Data Network, NDN for short) has relatively great influence.
In the NDN, two types of packets are mainly used: an interest packet (Interest packet) and a data packet (Data packet). The NDN maintains three tables: a storage table (Content Store, CS for short), a pending information table (Pending Interest Table, PIT for short), and a forwarding table (Forwarding Information Table, FIB for short), and performs forwarding and processing of the interest packet based on the three tables. In the NDN, a process of forwarding an interest packet is: when receiving an interest packet, a router in the NDN first queries the CS according to a content name (Content Name) in the interest packet; if the CS includes content matching the content name, sends the content through an incoming port of the interest packet. If the CS does not include content matching the content name, continues to query the PIT by using the content name, to determine whether there has been an interest packet for requesting same content; if the PIT includes a PIT entry matching the content name, adds the incoming port of the interest packet to the PIT entry and continues to receive a next packet. If the PIT does not include a PIT entry matching the content name, continues to query the FIB by using the content name. If the FIB includes an FIB entry matching the content name, forwards the interest packet to a next hop through an outgoing port in the matched FIB entry, where the next hop uses a same manner to forward the interest packet. If the FIB does not include an FIB entry matching the content name, discards the interest packet. It can be seen that, in an NDN, an FIB needs to be queried hop by hop for routing an interest packet, which leads to relatively low routing efficiency.